Damon Knight - Beyond the Barrier

They stood on the grassy plain just at dawn, when the greenish-blue sky to eastward was lit with yellow fires along the horizon, and the sun bulged up red as a blood-orange above the mountains.

Naismith switched off the bubble. The two entertainers looked at him without expression, then turned and began to walk away through the wet grass. After a moment they linked hands.

“Wait,” Naismith called after them. They turned. “How far does the influence of this machine extend?”

“About half a mile,” the girl said dully.

“Then if I take it farther away than that—or, better, if I remove it in time—you will die?”

“You know we will.”

“Then watch.” Naismith touched the controls, forming the bubble. He depressed and rotated the time control gently.

The two silent figures vanished; the plain writhed, darkened, glowed with sunlight, darkened again. Touching it more gently, Naismith turned the control the other way. The same sequence unrolled in reverse, like a film strip run backward.

The two figures appeared once more, then a third—Naismith himself, wings busy as he hovered in air, his grasping members holding the machine.

Invisible in the bubble, he watched himself leave. He saw the two Entertainers stiffen, saw them clutch each other. After a moment he saw them separate, open their eyes, look around in wonder.

Still he waited, until they dared to walk a few steps into the grass, calling to each other, breathing deep. Dawn was diffus-ing half the sky; across the plain, birdsong echoed.

Naismith lowered the bubble, brought it into phase and turned it off. The two humans did not even see him.

“Liss—Rab!” he called.

They turned, with incredulous faces. “It didn’t kill us!” said Liss-Yani. “Is this real?”

“It is real,” he told her.

“But then—” she whispered, and fell silent.

“They said that you Zugs made the illusion,” said Rab.

“They also told you we were hideous monsters,” Naismith replied drily. “Which is easier—to make an illusion you can see with your own eyes, or to make one that can only be seen through a ‘viewer’?”

They stared at him. “This is your true form?” Liss-Yani ventured.

“It is my only form.”

“And all this is real?”

Naismith did not reply. They were a pretty pair, he was thinking, especially the female; it would be interesting to breed them and see— He checked himself. Was that the Zug’s thought, or the man’s?

It was neither, he realized, but a blend… and how curious to think that this detached pleasure, half cool, half warm, was possible only to the mythological creature he had become….

“But why would they do this?” Rab asked.

“Tell me, when you left the City on their errands, did you ever think of staying on Earth?”

“Yes, often,” said Liss, her eyes glinting.

“Why didn’t you do so?”

“If we had stayed in the past, that would have changed history, changed the City—so it was impossible—it would have pinched out the loop.”

“And why didn’t you settle here, in your own present?”

The two looked at each other. “Because they made us think it was a wasteland,” Rab said.

Naismith inclined his head. “We will go back to the City now,” he said. “You will tell the other Entertainers, gather them all together. I will give you vehicles, tools, records, everything you need.”

They came toward him slowly. “But why are you doing this?” Liss asked.

“You would not understand,” said Naismith.

…In truth, he hardly understood himself. But as he moved through the glittering throng in the great hall, listening to the music and the voices, seeing the respectful looks on the faces of the Lenlu Din when they glanced his way, it seemed to Naismith that somehow, through accident and willfulness, he had woven himself precisely and symmetrically into the grand design.

Always, he thought, the universe tended to strike a balance between two excesses: long life and short, intelligence and mindlessness, mercy and cruelty. The tapestry unrolled, and there was never an end to it.

“Lord,” said a robot, drifting up, “the last of the Lenlu Din are being processed now in the gold chamber. In one hour they will all have been treated, as you ordered.”

Naismith dismissed it, and watched it float among the idle pleasure-seekers. He was pleasantly hungry; in half an hour it would be time to eat. After all, this way was best. In the old days, a Zug would have leaped upon his victim and devoured it on the spot. Now…

A few hundred yards away, from the midst of a large group, he heard the screeching of the old woman, the Highborn, hysterical and angry as ever. Other voices were soothing her.

All was normal, all was for the best in this best of worlds.

Naismith drifted over; the gaily dressed little people parted respectfully to let him through. Even the mad old woman interrupted her screeching to bob her head.

“Highborn,” said Naismith, “have you forgotten that you are about to retire for extended meditation?”

“I am? Am I?” she said uncertainly. “When am I going?”

“Almost immediately,” Naismith told her gently, and beckoned to a passing robot. “Show the Highborn to her chambers.”

“But won’t that be unpleasant?” she asked, letting herself be led away.

“You will not mind it at all,” Naismith promised her, and floated off in another direction.

Three fat little men, arms linked, drifted across his path with respectful glances. To them, he was no monster, but a revered counsellor and guide. The absence of the Entertainers did not strike them as odd: Drugged and hypnotized, they had forgotten there had ever been such a caste, or any other state of things.

They were cattle.

Was this mercy? Then a Zug could be merciful. Was it cruelty? Then there was cruelty in a man….

The game, Naismith realized now, was not over. The pattern was still unfolding, in this small and unimportant corner of the universe of stars.

Here, in the closed world of the City, he tasted triumph—

dominion was his. Yet it was good to know that down there on Earth, the human species was still free, still evolving in its pattern.

It was pleasant to think that in a thousand years, or ten thousand, Zug and Man might meet again, and this time blend their powers into something greater. It would take that long, or longer; Naismith and his kind could afford to wait.

For God is not born in a day.